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Thursday, April 12, 2012

Curious Case VI

And wouldn’t the insistent Summum Individuals have
ridden their man in Utah to write his own book?

There’s more. Besides Corky’s requests for a
suspension of disbelief regarding his story, there are the crimes against
history.

The major crime concerns the love affair Corky and his
disciples seem to have with Jesus in his Gnostic iteration. Example one. The
web page “Summum and Freemasonry” contains this statement by an anonymous
author: “The Seven Aphorisms . . . were also taught by
Jesus . . . The aphorisms were the basis of Gnostic Christianity, and the
teachings of Summum are the same as those of Gnostic Christianity.” Example
two. On the page “Sexual Ecstasy from Ancient Wisdom,” we learn that Jesus
Christ, in The Gospel of Thomas, said, “Anointed in the sacred wetness with the
magical spell of Merh [a liquid used in massage], drinking the Nectars of Gods
and giving your soul to my womb, all your fears vanish.”

The problems with the first example are that our knowledgeof the historical
Jesus—what he taught, who he thought he was—has been the subject of scholarly
debate for centuries, even millennia, and that recent scholars can’t agree on
what “Gnosticism” is. Not to speak of the fact that neither Corky nor his
successors give evidence for their bold assertions.

The problem with the second example is that The Gospel of Thomas, a
non-canonical compendium of the purported sayings of Jesus of uncertain date
and origin, has exactly nothing to say about either Merh or the Nectars of the
Gods.

There is another gaffe. Corky himself is reported to
have said before his death: “All religions have founders who had
revelations.”

Well, no. Many did. Some didn’t. Hinduism and Daoism
come to mind.

Finally, there’s the creative mathematics. According
to Blackley, Corky claimed that during the two years of his night classes at
the University of Utah, almost 20,000 people became members. Assuming,
generously, that this period lasted 104 weeks, counting the summers, and that
the room held 240 people, this would have amounted to a conversion rate of 80
percent per session. Corky must have been a charismatic speaker indeed.

In 2002, Corky was interviewed by Patty Henetz for the
Lubbock Avalanche Journal. She
reported that he claimed that since 1975, 250,000 people had “received” the
Summum teachings, though Summum didn’t keep membership rolls. Let’s see. In 27
years, that would be 9,260 per annum, or about 25 per diem. Of course, much
depends on the meaning of the word “received.” The more important point: If
there were no membership rolls, how could Corky have known the extent of his
power of persuasion?

In that same interview, Corky also estimated that more
than 250,000 bottles of his nectar had been given away to those who had
“undergone a screening process that involves reading about Summum and learning
how to meditate.” So for 23 years—from 1979, when the temple was finished, to
2002—10,870 bottles per annum, or about 30 per day, were given to those who had
been screened. Giving this gift involved not only the cost and time of brewing
the liquor; it required time to screen the applicants for their knowledge of
Summum and their ability to meditate in the Corky way. Generosity, thy name
must be Summum.

CNN, in 2009, interviewed Ron Temu, “a licensed
funeral director and longtime Summum practitioner,” who reported that
approximately 1,500 people had requested mummification. Yet only one, Corky
himself, had been mummified. One can only wonder about the chances of this
happening: out of a population of approximately 1,501, just one, and the
founder at that, had become a mummy awaiting transference. Amazing.